A couple of weeks ago I shared a photograph of the Houlton Unitarian Church under construction that looked like it was taken under similar conditions and (I suspect ) at about the same time as this photo of the Cary Library. Even the amount of snow on the ground looks about the same. There was a subsequent building boom in Houlton after the Great Fire of 1902 and these two buildings, were two buildings of many, that were included. If you look closely, you can see the parlor side of the Unitarian Church in the distance behind the Cary Library. You can clearly see the house next to us on the west side of the church. And it looks cold…
This week we continue with part five of our EarthCare series discussing “Adjustments” which include everything from technology to attitudes to actions. If you’d like to prepare for the discussion please read these two essays from our study book Not Too Late;
What to Do When the World Is Ending by Yotan Marom
page 105
Meeting the More and the Marrow by Roshi Joan Halifax
page 112
An excerpt from the Marom essay is included in today’s Support page in case you do not have a copy of the book. There are also two articles from The New York Times related to our Service topic.
Eclipse ’24 documentarians Mia Weinberger and Tom Van Kalken joined us for last week’s Sunday Service and they had a chance to meet members of our group and tour the building (perhaps UUHoulton will make an appearance in the film!). You’ll see some photos taken during coffee hour and an article about the film documentary in the Support Page as well.
YouTube Channel content for this week is a service guided by Randi Bradbury and Ira Dyer titled “I Am That I Am,” a continuation on the topic of “manifestation” which they introduced in their last service. Who are You? Explore this most interesting and personal question…Don Brushett is the musical guest. The link for our YouTube service is listed below.
We hope you can join us for one of the services. Keep warm everyone!
In Ministry,
Dave
Eclipse ’24
Once again, I’m including Holli Nicknair’s contact information. She is one of the co-chairs of our UUHoulton Eclipse Planning Committee and will also be leading a Sunday Service on February 11 sharing information and inspiration regarding the event.
Holli Nicknairhnicknair@gmail.com971-227-2933
Meet the NYC filmmakers heading to Houlton to make an eclipse documentary
HOULTON, Maine — The world lens will be focused on Houlton in April as the total solar eclipse makes its last United States showing before crossing the border into New Brunswick.
For that halting moment in time, two New York City-based filmmakers will also be filming the constellation of people, events and cosmic rarity slated to hit this rural Maine town on April 8.
Filmmakers Tom van Kalken and Mia Weinberger wanted to see the total solar eclipse this year. While researching potential places to go, Weinberger stumbled upon Houlton and fell instantly in love.
“I was watching a video of the past eclipse public forum and I was like, ‘I love this town, I love these people and it’s so interesting and cool that it’s the last place to see it in the country,’” she said.
That’s how their planned movie, “A Moment in the Sun,” got started.
“I think it’s exciting that we got their attention and they are wanting to highlight our community in their story,” said Johanna Johnston, executive director of the Southern Aroostook Development Corp., who has spoken to the filmmakers. “And what they are looking for is how a community comes together to put on a big once in a lifetime event like this.”
Van Kalken pointed to a trend in filmmaking that focuses on communities coming together to help each other. The industry is moving away from murders and cold cases, van Kalken said. In keeping with that trend, they want to create a feature-length documentary that looks at how all the townspeople will come together to welcome thousands of visitors to town.
“I love small towns and small town life and I think it’s really fascinating,” he said. “Everybody’s got a story to tell and we’re really excited to meet all these people and find out about their lives.”
The filmmaking duo is heading to Maine this week to attend an eclipse public forum at the Houlton High School on Thursday and to meet with people throughout the weekend. They are hoping to get a broad range of perspectives.
The eclipse is already thrusting the town into the national spotlight and town leaders hope the documentary will do even more for the community.
“From the development side, I hope this can now thrust us into permanent notoriety,” Johnston said. “We want to be known as a wonderful place to visit and welcome people to experience this with open arms and make a lasting memory.”
Weinberger and van Kalken initially reached out to Johnston and the connections to the community began sprouting. They have been meeting with a host of local residents and business owners via Zoom to start learning about the community.
“It’s an opportunity to tell our story and something that will last beyond the eclipse and that’s what we want,” Nancy Ketch, the town’s director of economic and community development, said. “A documentary is going to keep that momentum out there for a while.”
Both filmmakers have recently released award winning films, including Weinberger’s “The Last Hurrah, and van Kalken’s “The Salt of the Earth.”
Weinberger started her film career in comedy, eventually moving into more narrative work. And van Kalken was a writer and producer of a kids science show. They are life partners and this is the first film they will be making together.
Van Kalen was born in the United Kingdom but moved to Brisbane, Australia when he was 10. A filmmaker friend there, Jacob Richardson, along with his company, Film Focus Productions, will shoot the Houlton documentary.
They are looking for local crew members to work the day before and the day of the eclipse, they said. Additionally, they will have an online dropbox for people to upload their own videos from the eclipse for possible use in the film. For more information, visit the film’s webpage, https://www.amomentinthesunmovie.com/
THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE:
HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE
(Please note it won’t be active until 10AM on Sunday morning)
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
Topic: UUHoulton coffee hour & check-inTime: Feb 4, 2024 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/89792563015?pwd=2Yrqd76hvdKZc2DE7rp2nx5bLQux9h.1
Meeting ID: 897 9256 3015Passcode: 779220
Calendar of Events @UUHoulton
Feb 4 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson
Feb 7 Aroostook Climate Group meeting in the cafe 6PM
Feb 11 Sunday Service: Holli Nicknair
Feb 13 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
Feb 17 LGBTQ+ Luncheon in the cafe Noon
Feb 17 Houlton Coffeehouse 7PM Open-Mic Night
Feb 18 Sunday Service: Joshua Atkinson
Feb 25 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson
Feb 27 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
March 3 Sunday Service: TBA
March 6 Aroostook Climate Group meeting in the cafe 6PM
March 10 Sunday Service:David Hutchinson
March 12 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
March 16 LGBTQ+ Luncheon in the cafe Noon
March 16 Houlton Coffeehouse 7PM
March 17 Sunday Service: Annual Meeting (abbreviated service followed by potluck and meeting)
March 24 Sunday Service: Rev. Dale Holden Palm Sunday
March 31 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson Easter Sunday
Virtual Offering Plate
If you would like to send in your pledge or donation simply drop an envelope in the mail. The address is listed below. You can also send your donation electronically with our new payment system on the church website. Simply go to uuhoulton.org and click “Donate” on the menu and it will explain how the system works. You can set up a regular monthly payment plan or donate in single transactions. Thank you for your generous support!
UU Church of Houlton61 Military Street
EarthCare Study Material: What Do We
Do When the World is Ending?by Yotam Marom
What do people do when their worlds are ending? Despair is a reasonable reaction to the world we live in. I feel it everyday…It takes enormous effort to break through it, and even then it comes back. Despair is the kind of thing that comes in waves creeps under your skin, finds its way into your belly when you’re not paying attention. As George Lakey, who has spent his whole life fighting, and whom I have prodded about hope before, reminds me one day on the phone, in one of may moments of despair: “ I can let the newspapers tell me how my life will go, or I can decide for myself.”
In the moments of wisdom, encouraged by these heroes, I remember that despair is my vanity talking. It is an indulgence in the illusion that what is here and now is inevitable, that the future is written, that we can see how it will unfold. Despair is not about reality, or the world, or even ultimately the people we care about. It is about us. It is the act of allowing our very real sadness and fear to limit our sense of what is possible, about finding safety and comfort in that darkness, about avoiding heartbreak. Despair is the easy way out.
Despair is also quite simply, bad politics…In despair there is no need for good strategy, no need for healthy group culture. These are things we only need if we intend to take a real shot at winning. Despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy; it blocks us from taking agency, which makes it all the more likely that our worst fears will come to pass. As we look out on the political landscape before us, we have every right to assess it as bleak. but nothing about it is inevitable, and we shouldn’t expect our tiny human brains to know how everything will unfold. There are undoubtedly major social upheavals before us. The deep crisis we are in the midst of will bring not only pain and suffering but also incredible opportunities for change. People will find themselves moved, outraged, seeking, and out in the streets again in great numbers, many times in the coming decades.
Rather than pretend we know how it all ends, we should do the things we know have worked before: nurture and join powerful social movements, and build institutions that provide masses of people with a vehicle for belonging, meaning, and long-term struggle. This requires good strategy, healthy groups able to wield it, and a movement with a culture open and creative and compelling enough to win over the enormous numbers of people necessary for real transformation. And it requires humility – about what’s possible, about ourselves, about each other.
But beyond strategy, there is also just th simple, humble, profound task of being authentically alive on this planet in a time of collapse. Here, too, there is action, because there is more life in than taking of agency than in watching it flutter past us. Taking agency makes us smile and laugh and cry. It gives us the chance to express love and rage. It pumps our blood and fires our synapses. It creates new possibilities, compels action in others, and creates connection, which is what movements are made of. It gives us the opportunity to practice incredible traits like heroism, generosity, and care, lets us experience the joy, love, and gratitude that go hand in hand with those traits.
So what do we do when the world is ending? The same things that so many of the giants on whose shoulders we stand did when their worlds were ending. We choose to face our despair – to walk toward it and through it – choose to take action, choose to build movements. We do it because we don’t know how it ends, because there are possibilities out there that we simply can’t see from here. We do it because every person organized and campaign won and fraction of a degree of global warming prevented will save lives. Because movements that believe are far more powerful than movements that don’t. And, yes, we fight because fighting is one of the ways to nurture our courage and generosity and hope and all those other fundamentally human traits that we treasure most – because our lives will be infinitely richer in that struggle than outside of it. We do it because it is how we get to truly live.
Yotam is the founding director of the Wildfire Project, a training organization for grassroots organizing groups, and has facilitated in a variety of settings – from some of the leading racial justice and climate organizations in the US, to youth in Israel and Palestine, to some of the biggest movement moments of the past decade. Yotam was a leader at Occupy Wall Street, is a founding member of If Not Now and has initiated mobilizations and direct actions across issues, from immigration to climate justice and more.
Poetry Section:
YES
by William Stafford
It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It could, you know. That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.
But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.
Here is an example of economics, ethics and climate action coming together in the real world. I actually purchased my first
piece of Patagonia product last month in Fredericton. I will wear it to a service when spring comes around..
Posted by Dave
Patagonia’s profits are funding conservation
| By David Gelles and Kenneth P. Vogel |
Patagonia, the outdoor apparel brand, is funneling its profits to an array of environmental and political groups. A network of nonprofit organizations linked to the company has distributed more than $71 million since September 2022, according to publicly available tax filings and internal documents reviewed by The Times.
The gusher of philanthropic money is the product of an unconventional corporate restructuring in 2022, when Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard, and his family relinquished ownership of the company and declared that all its future profits would be used to protect the environment and combat climate change.
Patagonia and the Chouinards set up a series of trusts, limited liability corporations and charitable groups designed to protect the independence of the clothing company while distributing all of its profits through an entity known as the Holdfast Collective.
Holdfast made contributions to more than 70 groups during its first year in operation.
That included millions of dollars to protect wild lands around the globe, and grants for the Environmental Defense Center and Earthjustice.
“One of the principles that we had when we set this up is that all the money that we get every year is supposed to be spent,” said Greg Curtis, who is the Holdfast Collective’s lone employee. “So we’re in a more or less constant spend down mode.”
Consumerism vs. conservation
Chouinard, who founded Patagonia in 1973, struggled with his role as a businessman for his entire career. An avid rock climber, surfer and skier, he became deeply troubled by the degradation and depletion of natural resources.
As Patagonia grew into a billion-dollar business, he wrestled with his own role in promoting consumerism, and tried to create a responsible company that aimed to use organic and recycled materials and treat its employees and suppliers well.
A few years ago, Chouinard decided it was time to resolve the one conundrum that bothered him most: the fate of Patagonia. The company’s leadership team landed on a structure that allows the company to continue operating as a for-profit entity while donating its earnings to nonprofit groups.
Because the Chouinards did not sell the company and retain the proceeds or leave the company to their children, they did not face a significant tax bill. And because they donated the shares to 501(c)(4) organizations, they did not receive a substantial tax write off, paying about $17.5 million in taxes to facilitate the transaction in 2022.
The first full year of Holdfast’s giving has protected 162,710 acres of wilderness around the world, and it has pledged to protect another three million acres, much of it in Australia and Indonesia.
Shortly after the ownership change, Curtis learned about an effort to buy a swath of land in Alaska that would make it difficult to build Pebble Mine, a proposed gold and copper mine. In a matter of weeks, he agreed to provide the final $3.1 million that allowed the Conservation Fund to make the purchase, snarling the project.
“We were nearing the end of the deadline, and it was a grant in the amount that we needed to get across the finish line,” said Mark Elsbree, senior vice president for the western region for the Conservation Fund. “They were able to commit and enable us to act.”
The Holdfast Collective’s bare bones structure reflects a growing trend in philanthropy — embodied by MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — to give away vast sums of money with little to no overhead.
“It’s more proof that it doesn’t take an army to give a ton of money away successfully,” Ms. Palmer of The Chronicle of Philanthropy said. “Going lean and getting more money going out the door is important when you have urgent problems like the environment.”This article is part of our service material for tomorrow’s talk.
New York Times
Opinion Guest Essay
January 24, 2024
The Hundred Year Extinction Panic is Back, Right On Scheduleby Tyler Austin Harper
(assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College)
The literary scholar Paul Saint-Amour has described the expectation of apocalypse — the sense that all history’s catastrophes and geopolitical traumas are leading us to “the prospect of an even more devastating futurity” — as the quintessential modern attitude. It’s visible everywhere in what has come to be known as the polycrisis.Climate anxiety is driving new fields in psychology, experimental therapies and debates about what a recent New Yorker article called “the morality of having kids in a burning, drowning world.” Our public health infrastructure groans under the weight of a lingering pandemic while we are told to expect worse contagions to come. The near coup at OpenAI, which resulted at least in part from a dispute about whether artificial intelligence could soon threaten humanity with extinction, is only the latest example of our ballooning angst about technology overtaking us.
Meanwhile, some experts are warning of imminent population collapse. Elon Musk, who donated $10 million to researchers studying fertility and population decline, called it “a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Politicians on both sides of the aisle speak openly about the possibility that conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East could spark World War III. Donald Trump has made “the N-word” — he hastens to specify “the nuclear word” — a talking point at his rallies. The conviction that the human species could be on its way out, extinguished by our own selfishness and violence, may well be the last bipartisan impulse.In a certain sense, none of this is new. Apocalyptic anxieties are a mainstay of human culture. But they are not a constant. In response to rapid changes in science, technology and geopolitics, they tend to spike into brief but intense extinction panics — periods of acute pessimism about humanity’s future — before quieting again as those developments are metabolized. These days, it can feel as though the existential challenges humanity faces are unprecedented. But a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.Understanding the extinction panic of the 1920s is useful to understanding our tumultuous 2020s and the gloomy mood that pervades the decade.Hearing that historical echo doesn’t mean that today’s fears have no basis. Rather, it is crucial to helping us blow away the smoke of age-old alarmism from the very real fires that threaten our civilization. It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources. That suite of ideas is traditionally associated with political conservatism, though it can apply as easily to left-wing climate doom as to right-wing survivalist ideology. Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.
What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible. The irony, of course, is that this cynicism — and the unfettered individualism that is its handmaiden — greases the skids to calamity. After all, why bother fighting for change or survival if you believe that self-destruction is hard-wired into humanity? What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right.
As a scholar who researches the history of Western fears about human extinction, I’m often asked how I avoid sinking into despair. My answer is always that learning about the history of extinction panics is actually liberating, even a cause for optimism. Some of these earlier panics were caused by faulty, misinterpreted or creatively applied scientific developments. New paleontological and geological theories stoked a rash of extinction discourse in early-19th-century England, for example, and experts ginned up fears of famine and population explosion in the 1960s and ’70s. Other moments of paranoia, like the various spasms of nuclear-induced distress during the Cold War, were grounded in all-too-real threats. Nearly every generation has thought its generation was to be the last, and yet the human species has persisted. As a character in Jeanette Winterson’s novel “The Stone Gods” says, “History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival.”
***
One way to understand extinction panics is as elite panics: fears created and curated by social, political and economic movers and shakers during times of uncertainty and social transition. Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change. Today it’s politicians, executives and technologists. A century ago it was eugenicists and right-leaning politicians like Churchill and socialist scientists like Haldane. That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.
To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.
Despite the similarities between the current moment and the previous roaring and risky ’20s, today’s problems are fundamentally new. So, too, must be our solutions. It is a tired observation that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. We live in a peculiar moment in which this wisdom is precisely inverted. Making it to the next century may well depend on learning from and repeating the tightrope walk — between technological progress and self-annihilation — that we have been doing for the past 100 years. It will depend, too, on rejecting the conservative doommongering that defines our present: the entangled convictions that we are too selfish to forestall climate change, too violent to prevent war, too greedy to develop A.I. slowly and safely.
Extinction panics are often fomented by elites, but that doesn’t mean we have to defer to elites for our solutions. We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires. Our survival may well depend on reversing this trend. We need ambitious, well-resourced government initiatives and international cooperation that takes A.I. and other existential risks seriously. It’s time we started treating these issues as urgent public priorities and funding them accordingly.
The first step is refusing to indulge in certainty, the fiction that the future is foretold. There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede.
We are living in the very world that many in the 1920s already saw coming. But we’re also doing something they could not have predicted: surviving it. At least for now.Scenes from last week’s coffee hour…(photos by Ira)
…and the recent trend of fake animal fur making a fashion statement(photos by Dave)
Prayer List
For those working for social justice and societal changePray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nationThe war in Ukraine continues
Prayers for those in Palestine and Israel as the war continues into its third monthPrayers for the worsening humanitarian crisis in GazaPrayers for the homeless and hunger challenged during the cold seasonPrayers for those affected the the recent flooding in various coastal areas Prayers for those affected by the recent cold weather patterns across the United States and CanadaPrayers for Cyndie McCarthy who is in Bangor at Eastern Maine Medical CenterConcerns regarding yesterday’s US bombing campaign in the Middle East
The Four Limitless Ones Prayer
May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.
May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.
May we not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering.
May we dwell in the great equanimity free from anger, aggression and exclusion.
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